Thank you. It's a very good and important question.
I will give you the answer to how I recruited people for the Institute for Quantum Computing. You need to have a vision of what you want to do, so that the people you are trying to attract know that they are not going to come to a place where they are on their own, doing their little piece of work; they'll be supported by colleagues, students and post-doctoral fellows who can help them achieve the goals they want to.
You also need resources to do this, so if you hire a theoretician, it's relatively easy without too much in the way of resources, but as you've heard from Dr. Yazdi about building a fabrication facility, this doesn't come cheaply. Fortunately, Canada has been leading and helping to provide fabs that are for research, and maybe Dr. Yazdi could have commented on the difference between a fab that you do for research purposes and a fab that you do for production purposes.
For research purposes, you do not have to have a yield that is extremely high; you just want to have devices from time to time that have the right properties. However, if you want to commercialize and sell this, the yield has to be very high, and that's another ball game. Today, for $50 million to $100 million you can have a research fab. If you want to have a fab for commercialization, that goes into the hundreds of millions—if not the billions, certainly if you look at the Intel-type fab—so the cost there is depending on the purpose.
If you want to attract people, you need to have the resources, so having a vision, having a community and having resources are the three most important things. I'll add another one, which is to think outside the box. What I mean by this is, nowadays in the world in which we live, usually, when you hire a person they have a partner who is as smart as they are, so then you have to help them find a job and do various things or establish their family somewhere. That is where people from the committee, like you, can help. It means if you attract somebody from outside, they need a visa; they need support and a certain amount of certainty that they will be able to succeed in what they do.
What I have done in the past is talk to my local MP and ask them to help me to recruit people to come to Canada. I can tell you that 20 years ago the field was a lot easier and much less competitive. It was just the beginning, but today it is incredibly competitive. I see my three colleagues here, and they know what I mean about when you try to attract a really good person to come and join. The success is not 100%, and this is normal when it is highly competitive, but if we do it and we do it as a team effort, I think we can succeed.